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featured artists
Miguel Calderón
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biography
(b. Mexico City, Mexico, 1971; lives and works in Mexico City).
Miguel Calderón takes a humorous yet critical look at the production of culture and its diffusion into the public sphere. He belongs to the first generation of Mexicans who had wider access to mall and urban global cultures. His work draws on a mixture of forms and sources, including the telenovela (soap opera), mass tabloid imagery, international music videos and Mexican cartoons, diverse cinematic genres, and stereotyped notions of the "bad taste" of Mexico City’s working and middle classes. Calderon’s photographic works from the series (1998) question the social function of the museum and draw attention to the often elitist, remote character of the institution. In this series, he asked guards and maintenance workers at the National Museum of Art (MUNAL) in Mexico City to reenact the museum’s late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century academic paintings, works they take care of and know by heart. This series playfully references seventeenth-century Baroque masters such as Caravaggio and Velázquez, who also used real, identifiable sitters from all walks of life, particularly from humble and marginal origins, to portray religious and historical figures. Courtesy: Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
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